The present invention relates, in general, to communications networks and, more particularly, to managing accessibility by clients to pre-pushed content.
There are many techniques for improving users' experiences with communications services, including for increasing the apparent speed of downloads from the Internet. Some of those techniques involve pushing content to users' terminals in anticipation of a future request for the content by the user (e.g., “prefetching”). For example, a server-side system determines that a user is likely to request a certain web object (e.g., an embedded object on a webpage) in the near future and anticipatorily pushes the object to the user's client-side storage. When the user ultimately requests the object, the request can be processed and fulfilled locally using the pre-pushed version of the object, thereby avoiding delays (e.g., round-trip times, etc.) associated with fulfilling the request over the Internet.
Some content providers desire or even require restricted access to some or all of their content. For example, content providers may require a user to log in to a session prior to gaining access to an object, may limit distribution of the object based on licensing fees or copyright restrictions, etc. Accordingly, while content providers may support improved access to their content, they may not support providing that content to users in an anticipatory fashion (e.g., without sufficiently accounting for licensing, authentication, etc.).
As such, it may be desirable to pre-push content to users in such a way that the content is unusable by the user until the user explicitly requests the content.